What "Idle timeout" is about

Submitted by Dave Brooks on Sat, 11/10/2018 - 16:09

Once in a while, we run into a vendor program with behavior that is a little puzzling. If you follow this link you’ll see the situation we ran into under the topic "Print a PDF file silently". The notion of "the program that never exits" is exactly what we are talking about in this topic. And this particular program is not an isolated instance.

That’s why we developed the "idle timeout" handler. When you enable this, we monitor once per second how much CPU the program is using. We include all the program’s descendants; you wouldn’t believe how many Windows programs actually launch other programs ... which seems ironic considering we're talking about programs that RPM launches.

When RPM monitors your program's idle time then like we said it watches the program and its descendants for CPU time. Once that total stops increasing it starts to take note of how long it stops. Once that total reaches your threshold, RPM considers your process to be idle.

Notably, this setting does NOT mean that RPM will allow the program to run a maximum of ten seconds or whatever you have that period set to. It can run forever if it continues to use CPU. However, that doesn’t seem like a good candidate for an RPM filter program.

We've had people tell us their program may need ten minutes. That's not a problem for us. If it continues to use CPU then we're good. And, if you don't select the idle time limit then RPM won't check.